Personal: Married 29 years, two children in college. Lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea.

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November 10, 2010 - SAN DIEGO, CA- Petri dishes with algae in the lab of UCSD Professor Stephen Mayfield. They are part of his research into turning algae into fuel. (Howard Lipin/San Diego Union-Tribune) Mandatory Photo Credit: HOWARD LIPIN/ San Diego Union-Tribune/ZUMA PRESS, San Diego Union-Tribune Publishing Company.

November 10, 2010 - SAN DIEGO, CA- Petri dishes with algae in the lab of UCSD Professor Stephen Mayfield. They are part of his research into turning algae into fuel. (Howard Lipin/San Diego Union-Tribune) Mandatory Photo Credit: HOWARD LIPIN/ San Diego Union-Tribune/ZUMA PRESS, San Diego Union-Tribune Publishing Company.

If you’re thinking about going solar, well, in a way, you already have.

Most of the energy we use on Earth was created by the sun. Oil, coal, natural gas, wind, hydropower, even the heat from a wood-burning stove. (Big exceptions are nuclear and geothermal power.)

By relying on fossil fuels, we’ve built a civilization on ancient rays of the sun.

Stephen Mayfield, a scientist at the University of California San Diego, is working on how to transition to harvesting sunlight falling on the earth now into energy that can power the future without increasing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, or CO2.

This comes after a career focused on the genetics of algae and the founding of a biotechnology company that used algae to make lifesaving therapeutic substances.

Now director of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, Mayfield discussed algae and why it matters.

Algae uses photosynthesis, the process of turning sunlight into chemical energy, but it’s different from plants because it lives in water, where the amount of carbon dioxide can be increased to boost production. That’s good because it takes greenhouse gases out of the air, even if they end up back in the atmosphere when algae fuels are burned.

Q: How do you get that extra CO2 into the water?

A: You can actually take it and pump it in there, you can bubble it in water, and as long as the pH is set right and there’s the right kind of water chemistry. … And can we get this out of the air and pump it into the water. You can get it from smokestacks, from coal-fired power plants, you can get it from cement kilns.

Q: How can algae help turn sunlight into something we can use?

A: What we need is chemical energy. Chemical energy could be food, like corn, could be sugar. But petroleum is also chemical energy.

Sunlight is energy, but it’s not in a form we can do things easily with. It sort of lands on the earth and reflects back into the heavens and turns into heat, but it’s hard for us to grab it and do anything with it. We can’t store it, for example. But if we can turn that light energy into chemical energy, we can store it, we can ship it, we can do all those things.

Q: Why do we have to worry about alternative fuels now? Isn’t there enough oil, coal and gas to keep us going for decades?